Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne (review)

Perhaps more so than for other mid-eighteenth-century prose writers, the relationship between Sterne, his work, and his profession presents a literary and biographical puzzle. While we could see elements of the perfectionist editor in Richardson’s work, of dramatic flair and legal training in Fielding’s, and of the surgeon in Smollett’s, Sterne the clergyman and Sterne the (sometimes bawdy) writer seem to inhabit opposite poles. Some recent critics preferred to dismiss the possibility of Sterne’s piety in favour of more exciting and less laborious hypotheses, making the vicar a closet atheist, an existentialist, a postmodernist. This situation has persisted over the last fifty years, despite scattered and intense efforts by Arthur H. Cash, Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Melvyn New, Donald R. Wehrs, J.T. Parnell, and others.

The scope of Martha F. Bowden’s Yorick’s Congregation in a sense defines the extent of the infrequently visited aspects of Sterne’s relationship to eighteenth-century Anglicanism as well as its practice, often misunderstood (even by literary scholars) in the twenty-first century. Her volume maps out an ambitious historical and ecclesiastic program, which includes discussion of Sterne’s clerical family, the role played by churches in eighteenth-century communities, contemporary perspectives on Sterne the preacher, the influence of women and Roman Catholicism on Anglicanism, and a reframing of the theoretical and practical religious contexts of Sterne’s major work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Sterne’s own life is, of course, a rich confluence of Anglican influences, and Bowden weaves together family tradition and Sterne’s own clerical practice to produce a convincing composite portrait of Sterne the churchman. This is the picture of a man devoted to his profession and utterly at home in his time, the great-grandson of the Archbishop Richard Sterne, a national hero during the English Civil War. Biographers have not been quick to draw parallels between the two men, yet Bowden finds a fascinating parallel between the casual attitude of Richard’s statue at York Cathedral and the iconic image of Laurence painted by Reynolds, and we are left to ponder what Sternean whimsies the archbishop may have had up his lawn sleeves.

We are reminded here, as in other recent sombre assessments of Sterne’s theological and political place in the church, just how conventional a clergyman he was for his time, an assessment further reinforced by the inclusion of three of his sermons in William Rose’s popular collection, The Practical Preacher. Placing his work within this contemporaneous context goes a long way toward grounding the historic persona of Sterne the preacher, who after all was neither Yorick nor what his worst critics claimed, but a sincere Latitudinarian and gifted rhetorician.

Illuminating aspects of Anglican practice in Sterne’s time, Bowden performs the invaluable service of making these historically distant habits at once near and familiar. This volume is peppered with details fleshing out Georgian Anglicanism that may surprise twenty-first-century churchgoers and scholars (for instance, hymns were not sung during services until the nineteenth century, and vicar is derived from the Latin for substitute). The Book of Common Prayer and the catechism become unexpectedly influential in the Shandean world. Less surprising is Sterne’s apparent anti-Catholicism and the signal shift of Yorick’s befriending the monk Lorenzo in A Sentimental Journey, but the summary is useful nonetheless.

The most immediate bounty throughout for literary critics is suggested by a multitude of parallels between Sterne’s fictional world and Bowden’s newly detailed understanding of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Viewed through this lens, the issues of birth, marriage, and death – core themes of Tristram Shandy – are thrown into distinct relief, and we find ourselves suddenly more familiar with Sterne’s characters: Mrs Shandy, for example, sheds some of her mystery when we view her as ‘closely tied to the rhythms and concerns of her community.’ From...